Chapter 21 Sparring
Sparring
Ihesitated outside the door to his shed compartment, fighting an odd feeling of déjà vu. After that few seconds’ pause, I knocked.
I couldn’t remember ever having done that before, which now struck me as strange, not only because the space was his, but now, with the added strangeness of who he actually was.
He owned half the school, if not the entire school, or his family did.
It was something I’d known before I attended my first class at Malcroix, but the reality somehow never sank in, not until the morning I woke up in his private living quarters inside Malcroix Mansion.
Something about the administration going to him, asking him to act as my private fight instructor, had driven the point home, although I couldn’t have said why, exactly.
Why would Bones agree to this?
When no one answered the knock, I remembered the shed was heavily shielded, and soundproof from the outside. It must be the same from inside the shed.
Are you coming in? a familiar voice asked. Or has Quicksilver managed to convince you I intend to put you in a full body cast on the first day?
I rolled my eyes, but my nerves didn’t dissipate.
I took a breath, then tugged on the door’s handle, only to have it open easily.
I walked into a room that was still dim, but brighter than I’d ever seen it. Lanterns hung on hooks along the walls, lit for the first time I’d been inside. He’d covered half the floor in thick pads, and I saw heavy bags and practice dummies I didn’t remember from my other visits.
Bones glanced over as I walked in, in the middle of wrapping one of his hands with a long strip of black cloth.
I’d never seen him like this anywhere but in his room the previous Saturday.
He had on long black trousers like me, but his were form-fitting, and he wore nothing else, not even shoes.
He seemed to have given up hiding his scars from me altogether because they stood out visibly on his skin, even in the dim light.
“You shouldn’t wear clothing that loose,” he said, after giving me a cursory look.
“Not unless I have you specifically practicing in street clothes. We won’t do that for a while,” he added, giving me another appraising stare.
“But eventually, yes, I’ll test you in a number of outfits that are comparable to what you wear outside.
For today, I just want to conduct a basic skills assessment, and maybe show you a few things. ”
I blinked, a little taken aback.
I guess I’d expected some kind of preamble.
Possibly a few complaints about being stuck with me.
At the very least, I’d expected a half-threatening lecture on how I was supposed to describe these lessons to anyone who asked.
“Quicksilver said you had an incident in class a few weeks back?” Bones commented.
He pressed the end of the last coil of wrap to the back of his hand and murmured a spell.
He released it, and the cloth bandage held in place.
He glanced up. “A hydra? He said it was pretty impressive for someone with only a year of magic under their belt.”
I scoffed. “That’s not what he said to me.”
A bare twitch reached Bones’s lips. “I imagine not.”
He motioned me deeper into the room. “Do you know how to wrap your hands?”
I blinked at him again, then shook my head. “No.”
“I’ll do it this time,” he said, his voice still flatly neutral.
“Pay attention to each step in the process. The order is important. Next time, you’ll try it yourself and I’ll correct you.
The third time you’re here, I’ll expect you to do it on your own…
to try at least. You’ll have to fight with whatever fucked-up result you get, so I would recommend making an effort to learn to do it properly.
If you end up having to ask me to show you again, I’ll require payment for the service. ”
At what must have been a startled look from me, he quirked an eyebrow.
“Don’t get paranoid, Shadow,” he mocked. “I didn’t mean I was going to beat you up. Or demand a blow-job. I meant push-ups or running or something else you won’t like. Something that will make it hard to get out of bed the next morning.”
I frowned but only nodded, somehow completely lacking my usual impulse to roll my eyes or toss words back at him. I walked over to where he stood and noticed he already had two coiled wraps tucked under his left arm. He pulled one out, then motioned me closer.
“Hold out your hand,” he said. “Flat. Fingers spread.”
I watched intently as he wrapped first one hand, then the other.
I tried to memorize the order in which he wrapped each part, starting with the strap over my thumb, then the wrist and then the palm and thumb, before wrapping all of my other fingers, then crossing the back of my hand, then back around the wrist. He worked precisely, methodically, seemingly unbothered by having to do it all upside down.
“Where’d you learn the hydra?” he asked casually as he worked.
“Alaric.”
Bones’s fingers stuttered briefly, then resumed their precise movements.
“What did you use?” he asked, just as casually. “For the transmorph?”
I flushed enough to feel it in my cheeks.
One thing I’d learned the hard way: magic followed a lot of the same rules as physics did in Overworld.
Meaning, you couldn’t generally make things appear out of nothing.
To create a mug with magic, you needed enough matter to make it out of something else.
To transform yourself into an animal, you generally had to turn into an animal roughly your human size, using the same amount of matter, only with that matter redistributed.
There were ways to make yourself into more than one animal, or make yourself larger, using other living matter, but that was generally considered incredibly risky to experiment with, and could end up with you dead or permanently disfigured, like that Earth movie, The Fly.
Some things could be pulled out of the air, like fire, or those ice shards Bella Chalmers had thrown at me in Quicksilver’s class, by transmorphing water molecules. You could even knock someone out that way, distilling certain gasses.
But everything had to come from somewhere.
Dark magicks allowed one to pull whole beings from other dimensions, but that generally required a ritual, which wasn’t practical in most sparring situations.
If one were to cast something big, like, say, a giant, six-headed, fire-breathing hydra in the middle of an experimental magic shed, it required a fair bit of matter to produce.
Possibly even all of the sitting cushions and half of the sparring dummies and heavy bags in the massive, football-field-length room, along with an oak table, four heavy targets for combat spells, and your instructor’s favorite chair. Just for example.
Which was another reason Quicksilver hadn’t been overly pleased with me when I cast that hydra in class the other day.
Bones must have felt some of that on me, because he grunted.
“Right,” he said.
He finished wrapping my left hand, and released me after using the same, one-word spell to stick the end of the wrap to my bound wrist.
He twisted my hand a few ways to make sure he had it how he wanted it.
“The joining cast is fibule,” he said, stepping back. “All right. Come on out here, then.” He walked, barefoot, to the padded part of the room’s floor, and I felt myself already beginning to tense, even before I forced my legs and feet to follow him.
I told myself I was being stupid. How many times had I done this with Alaric? And what was the difference, really? It’s not like Alaric hadn’t gotten a kick out of knocking me on my arse. Why shouldn’t this be the same?
Once out in the center of the padded space, Bones turned, facing me.
“Okay,” he said, once I joined him in the arena space. “I want you to attack me.”
I blinked a third time.
“Attack you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Oh, and forget everything Quicksilver taught you, at least for now,” he added, his voice still disconcertingly flat. “I just want to conduct a baseline assessment for today. I’m not interested in seeing your standard forms just for the sake of it, anyway.”
When I flinched, he added, “I’m not cracking on Quicksilver…
he has to do that. That’s his job, to get students ready for professional assessment, and to get their fighting skills ranked.
But I don’t give much of a fuck how highly you qualify, much less if you’re eligible for tournaments.
I’m purely interested in whether you can do enough damage to flee an opponent and actually get away. ”
I stared at him. “Flee? You want me to flee opponents?”
For the first time, irritation touched his gold eyes.
“You’re damned right I do,” he growled. “Since everyone seems intent on poisoning you, I also intend to train you on how to counteract substances meant to lower your motor controls and your reflexes, at least well enough to perform defensive magic. We’ll graduate to deadly poisons if you can master the merely disabling ones…
again, with the intent to counteract their worst effects well enough for you to flee and actually get away.
But I can’t do any of that until I have some idea of how you’d handle yourself in a real fight situation right now. ”
I was staring at him, though.
I lowered my hands, more puzzled than irritated, or even offended.
“Can you actually counteract poisons?” I asked. “Well enough to fight?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice a touch cold. “I’ve been trained in methods for circumventing poisons and disabling spells since I was ten years old.”
“And lethal poisons?” I asked, incredulous.
“And lethal spells, yes,” he said.
“Who exactly arranged this?” I asked, now that I had him talking. “You teaching me? I know it wasn’t Professor Quicksilver. He made it clear he doesn’t approve of his star pupil being used to train his biggest pain in the arse among the second-years.”
“It wasn’t Quicksilver,” Bones said.